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SECOND-HAND SOULS
SELECTED WRITING
T R A N S L AT E D FROM
THE ROMANIAN
AND INTRODUCED
BY SEAN COTTER
PRAGUE / 2003
Copyright © 1993, 1999, 2000, 2003 by Nichita Danilov
Introduction and translation copyright © 2003 by Sean Cotter
This edition © 2003 by Twisted Spoon Press
isbn 80-86264-08-4
9
Tr a n s l a t o r ’s I n t r o d u c t i o n
21
N i n e Va r i a t i o n s f o r t h e O r g a n
Kiril / 22 • Cyril / 23
Ferapont / 26 • Ferapont / 27
Lazăr / 30 • Lazarus / 31
Daniel / 32 • Daniel / 33
Celălalt Kiril / 34 • The Other Cyril / 35
Atichin / 36 • Atikin / 37
Celălalt Ferapont / 38 • The Other Ferapont / 39
Celălalt Lazăr / 40 • The Other Lazarus / 41
Coborârea lui Daniel / 42 • Daniel’s Descent / 43
45
Selected Poetr y
Senin / 46 • Serenity / 47
Din timp în timp / 48 • From Time to Time / 49
Lied (II) / 50 • Lied (II) / 51
Lied (V) / 52 • Lied (V) / 53
Neantul / 54 • The Void / 55
Despre poezie / 56 • On Poetry / 57
Poem / 58 • Poem / 59
Scurt poem de dragoste / 60 • Short Love Poem / 61
Chip orb / 62 • Blind Face / 63
Căderea / 64 • The Fall / 65
Portret al artistului la tinereţe / 68 • Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man / 69
Celui care vine / 72 • To the One Who Will Come / 73
Finita la commedia / 74 • Finita la commedia / 75
Peisaj cu îngeri orbi / 80 • Scene with Blind Angels / 81
Apus / 82 • West toward the Sun / 83
Răstingnire / 84 • Crucifixion / 85
Iluminare / 86 • Enlightenment / 87
Îngerul / 88 • The Angel / 89
Nimicul / 92 • Nothingness / 93
Peisaj diurn / 94 • Diurnal Scene / 95
Din nou, Ferapont / 98 • Again, Ferapont / 99
Profetul / 102 • The Prophet / 103
Trup / 104 • Body / 105
Lan / 106 • Field / 107
Second-Hand / 108 • Second-Hand / 109
Îngerul / 112 • The Angel / 113
Anatol / 114 • Anatol / 115
Invocaţie / 118 • Invocation / 119
Somn / 120 • Sleep / 121
Poem în O / 122 • Poem in O / 123
Apele sufletului / 124 • Waters of the Soul / 125
Peisaj cu mâini şi aripi / 126 • Scene with Hands and Wings / 127
129
Selected Prose
On Writers / 131
In the Author’s Cell / 135
Sound and Space / 139
How Much Fiction is There in a Poetic Text? / 142
T R A N S L AT O R ’ S I N T R O D U C T I O N
9
speaking both Russian and Romanian, he writes solely in the
latter language.
The Lippovan identity as religious dissenters has been instru-
mental in constructing Danilov’s own identity. His mystical
vision of religious experience seems to inform all his poems,
even those that do not contain explicitly religious imagery. The
imagery itself can be located in the Romanian engagement with
Surrealism, which has provided Danilov a mode for describing
an ineffable God. In his poetry and theoretical writings, he
argues that the divine is manifest in this world through surre-
alistic moments, that is, through jarring juxtapositions.
Danilov’s poetic technique is an imitation of this image of God.
Not only does his poetry express his relationship with the
divine, but it also demonstrates his relationship with the day-
to-day world. He is conscious of the jarring effect his technique
can have on the reader, and he words his poems carefully to bal-
ance that effect. At no time do we see Danilov detached from his
relationship with others, writing purely for God or for his own
amusement. He is constantly writing in the tension he feels
between the divine world and our own.
Danilov, an Orthodox Christian, understands the divine as
the Creator God of Genesis. The world in which we live is the
“created” world. Danilov also refers to another world, one where
the divine resides. Because the divine is the Creator and not the
created, he calls the divine realm the “uncreated.” His poetry is
a kind of prophecy, not of a world to come, but of the simulta-
neous existence of another world. The poems take place in a
world similar to but other than ours. Familiar images, such as a
window lit at night or a man playing chess, are set against an
10
indefinite, monochrome landscape; they are suspended in front
of green and black fields, void of intelligible detail. His prophecy
is a vision of our world sustained by these voids.
The presence of another world in Danilov’s poetry has more
than an aesthetic significance. In his critical writings he states
that he has in fact experienced an other world. He describes
visions, hallucinations that offer a writer what he needs:
11
Danilov, the world “beyond the world we perceive” is a void, as
in the title of his major collection, The Void above All Things.
Because the divine is ineffable, no poem he writes will be an
adequate expression of its nature.
But his vision also includes a radical skepticism. The major
distinction between Danilov and traditional negative theology
is his emphasis on the impossibility of meaningful communica-
tion with the divine at any level. Meister Eckhart, for example,
presents a dialogic relationship with the uncreated, in which the
mystic is pecking his way out of his shell, while, on the other side,
God is pecking in. For Danilov, however, we have no way to
peck. The most we can do is passively wait for a divine eruption
in this world, the nature and timing of which are impossible to
predict.
When these eruptions do occur, more often than not they
confirm the incommensurability of the uncreated and created
worlds. Danilov uses the angel, the traditional image of com-
munication between earth and heaven, to show how unsuitable
these worlds are to each other. In one poem, an angel realizes
he is in the created world and hangs himself from his halo. The
earth is so harsh that even divine beings suffer. They are driven
to drink:
12
Danilov’s angels are far from Dante’s spiritual guides, far
from Rilke’s terrible presences. His angels are incapable of
functioning in this world. They arrive as incarnations of
incommensurability. Even though the angels come from the
divine, they are corrupted, sometimes battered by their contact
with the created world. “To The One Who Will Come” sounds
like a warning from one angel to his successor:
13
occurs in “our daily bread,” the place of holy nourishment,
makes the irony of a believer’s relationship with God all the
more apparent. The suffering that Danilov describes is not the
result of the absence of the divine in this world, a simpler and
maybe preferable situation. Rather, suffering is a result of the
world being in an inscrutable, unpredictable relationship with
God. Danilov describes this situation in images of his angels
playing games of chance:
14
. . . We have to include Dalí, without a doubt, among
those who have seen it recently. Recall the flaming
giraffe. What is in each drawer of the giraffe’s chest, if
not the uncreated? (122)
15
The divine responds by unexpectedly juxtaposing incompatible
terms, croaking being as foreign to a dog as burning is to a
giraffe. The tears that appear in Danilov’s poems, such as those
of Daniel in Nine Variations for the Organ, are often tears of frus-
tration with the incommensurability of a person’s reverence and
the divine’s caprice. This frustration with divine ineffability
appears in Danilov’s prose as well:
16
divine into a poetic practice. He imitates the unpredictability of
the uncreated. We can see the resemblance of the uncreated and
the poet by juxtaposing this description of the former:
17
the ruptured literary language common in Romanian post-
modernism, and what distinguishes him from simple sadism, is
his conviction that poetry wields a real power over the reader.
He feels a responsibility to take great care over the language and
images of his poems. We see his carefulness in his ars poetica, “On
Poetry.” Here he describes an eccentrically dressed saddle-maker
named Johann, a craftsman, as is the poet. “Every harness” that
Johann makes he tests “first on himself.” After he puts on fancy
clothes, he harnesses himself to a carriage for a short trip:
The answer, of course, is that poets are like that. Danilov sees
himself as a craftsman, a creator of poems. But the poems he
creates might bruise his reader. After all, this creation involves
the most powerful energies that we can imagine, the power, for
example, to set fire to a giraffe. The poet cannot ask his reader
to empathize with an object that might do him real harm.
Danilov therefore states that the language and form of the poem
should be carefully constructed, contending that the poet
18
He is arguing here against a poetry that is not carefully con-
structed, a poetry that does not take its relationship with the
reader seriously. Danilov’s own clear sentence structure and
simple forms are an attempt to avoid bruising his reader, an
attempt to fulfill this duty.
Like his skeptical theology, Danilov’s understanding of a
poem’s capacity to bruise has a radical edge. He argues that the
words of a poem have the potential to bruise not only our aes-
thetic sensibilities, but also our bodies. He tells of writing a
prose poem about a man with three black holes in his head:
The words that a poet employs can have a physical effect, and
not only on the person who writes them and those who read
them, but also on those who have not read them. Danilov tells
us that during a train trip, after his hair had grown back, he
overhears an anecdote that brings the prose poem to his mind
for the first time in several months:
The man who told it, an engineer for the roads around
19
Dorohoi, had three bald spots on his head. I wanted to
ask him if by chance he had been swimming in Lake
Ciric, where I had scattered the ash of my poem about
Hans, but I held myself back. (21)
The poet may actually have the same power as his angel coun-
terpart: he may introduce unpredictability into the world
through his poetry just as he imagines the angels do through
their gambling. This combination of uncertainty and potency
makes the careful construction of a poem an ethical concern.
Beyond demonstrating that the writer is always in relationship
with the two worlds of the uncreated and the created, beyond
arguing that in this relationship the poem should avoid bruising
its reader (or non-reader), Danilov does not describe the precise
boundaries of his ethics. In fact, given the relationship of the two
worlds, he cannot describe the boundaries precisely. He states
that the poet’s words come from his encounter with the uncre-
ated, but their appearance is inexplicable: like catching a fish in
an empty pond. He suggests that the poet has a “responsibility”
to the world around him, but his power is unpredictable. We do
not know just how or when the poet can be said to affect the
world. Danilov’s ethics is a peculiar combination of potency and
confusion: the great power of his creativity is circumscribed by
a spiritual mystery. In the same way that Danilov writes in the
tension between the uncreated and the created worlds, he writes
in an ethics whose restrictions are unknowable by their nature.
With this situation in mind, we can better understand the spir-
itual frustration we find in many of these poems.
Sean Cotter
20
N i n e Va r i a t i o n s f o r t h e O r g a n
22
CYRIL
Cyril the monk lives inside a well and writes a black psalter.
He has lived there since the age of Constantine. Around him,
the water has parted, leaving the walls wet and cold. He warms
his hands from time to time at a stone lamp. On the right
corner of his table, a blind bird pecks at a small plate of seeds.
I lean over the side of the well, and watch him, very care-
fully: everything that he writes, I copy into another psalter.
Occasionally he raises his eyes toward me, but he does not
say anything.
23
Am în faţa mea o clepsidră şi-mi moi pana în nisipul care se
scurge din ea. Pentru asta trebuie, într-adevăr, să fiu deosebit
de atent; orice boare de vânt
îmi poate da peste cap tot ce am scris.
Deasupra mea stă aplecat altcineva şi transcrie tot ce scriu
eu. Dacă îmi ridic cumva ochii spre el, îşi vâră imediat nasul în
carte şi se preface că-i absorbit de lectură.
Seamănă binişor cu mine şi cu Kiril.
De multe ori se apleacă atât de mult peste margine, încât îi
strig să fie atent, să aibă grijă să nu se prăbuşească în puţ. Dar el
râde, hohoteşte ca un nebun.
El este fratele Ferapont.
24
In front of me is an hourglass. I dip my quill in the stream
of falling sand. I have to be exceptionally careful: any breath
of wind
would erase everything I have written.
Someone else leans over me, copying what I write. If I look
at him, he immediately puts his nose in his book, as if he is
absorbed in reading.
He looks a little like both Cyril and me.
He often leans dangerously far over the well’s edge. I yell
at him to be careful not to fall down the shaft. He giggles at
me like a crazy man.
He is Brother Ferapont.
25
FERAPONT
26
FERAPONT
27
Deşi e trist nu l-am văzut plângând niciodată.
Are o voce groasă şi cântă tot felul de psalmi.
Aş vrea să-mi moi pana şi să scriu cu tristeţea acestor
priviri. Dar el stă mult deasupra mea şi oricât de sus mi-aş
ridica mâna, tot nu i-aş putea atinge ochii.
Deasupra fratelui Ferapont stă fratele Lazăr.
28
Although he is a sad man, I have never seen him cry.
He has a deep, rich voice, and he knows many psalms.
I would like to wet my quill in the sadness of his gaze. But
he is so far above me. However high I raise my hand, I cannot
reach his eyes.
Above Brother Ferapont is Brother Lazarus.
29
L A Z Ă R
30
LAZARUS
31
DANIEL
32
DANIEL
33
C E L Ă L A L T K I R I L
34
THE OTHER CYRIL
A rat has chewed through the sole of his left sandal, and
now it gnaws at his foot. But he feels no pain. He
does not bleed. As if he were dead.
He has a gray beard and a beaked nose.
35
AT I C H I N
36
AT I K I N
37
C E L Ă L A L T F E R A P O N T
38
THE OTHER FERAPONT
The other Ferapont looks half like me and half like the
first Ferapont. His right eye is like mine. The blue one
looks like Ferapont’s.
His head rests on his chest, as if he were meditating deeply
on something. His skin is much darker than the first
Brother Ferapont.
39
C E L Ă L A L T L A Z Ă R
40
THE OTHER LAZARUS
41
COBORÂREA LUI DANIEL
42
D A N I E L’ S D E S C E N T
43
Selected Poetr y
SENIN
46
SERENITY
47